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Sunday, October 5, 2014

Book Review: Technos

I’ve been meandering through E. C. Tubb’s “Dumarest”
series of pulp SF novels at the breezy pace of one every nine years. Since there’s something like 33 books in the
saga, and I’ve read four to date, I should finish them all sometime around the
year 2275 AD.

That’s all a bit tongue-in-cheek. The first Dumarest novel I read was one I
found stashed away in a drawer with a handful of other 70s sci-fi paperbacks (a
legacy of my father’s) as a ten-year-old.
I struggled through it but never quite completed it, being only ten
years old and not worldly savvy like I am today, I didn’t quite get the themes
and concepts and whatnot. I was still
cutting my teeth on Asimov at this stage, and while Asimov is light-years
superior to E. C. Tubb, the latter is not necessarily valueless in the genre of
science fiction.

Earl Dumarest is the loner hero of the series, a
rough-and-tumble man-with-no-name far-futuristic hitchhiker working odd jobs on
this planet and then that one, trying to earn enough money for passage to the
next rock, always searching for that fabled lost world of Earth. And who isn’t (at least in a huge swath of
Science Fiction)? But these books came
out in the late 60s and all throughout the 70s, so it wasn’t quite yet the
tired old cliché it is today. The thing
I find most interesting about the saga is that each novel is spartan, compact,
gritty – little Quentin Tarantino vignettes if Quentin Tarantino did sci
fi.

So I tend to view these books as long teevee
episodes. Ninety-minutes, instead of
sixty. Two season’s worth. With different Guest Stars each week. Dumarest and his quest are the only constants
in Tubb’s universe, or my imaginary televised versions of his novels.

Ten or fifteen years ago I found a battered copy of that
first Dumarest book, Haven of Darkness, in a used bookstore and finally
read it all the way through. About four
years ago I picked up online the first two books in the series (The Winds of
Gath and Derai), read ’em and reviewed ’em here and here. Over the past summer I came across two more
in a used book store in Pennsylvania. Technos is the first of those two, #7
in the series. #8 is swinging a bat in
the on-deck circle.

I read Technos in one day. Three hours.
While it was not good in a harrumphing, lit-major sort of way, it was
good in a can’t-put-it-down sort of way.
Kinda like watching a ninety-minute sci fi show on the WB or a
made-for-Syfy Syfy movie. I got hooked
right from page 4, and had to see it all the way through to the denoument on
page 154.

How would the story appear summarized in a teevee
guide? How ’bout – Fulfilling a dying
man’s wish, Dumarest travels to the militant world Technos, searching for a
clue to Earth’s whereabouts, becomes entangled in political intrigue and thrown
into the dreaded labyrinth, accused of attempted assassination of the planet’s
ruler.

Sounds simple, but a lot is packed into those phrases and
clauses. The dying man – who saved our
hero from a freak mining accident – spurs Dumarest to the bucolic farmworld of
Loame, suffering under the yoke of Technos in the form of the Thorge, a
devastating unstoppable form of biological weed warfare. Sneaking into the oppressor world, a kind of
planetary North Korea,
Dumarest eludes pursuit, seeks out a woman with an eidactic memory that might
hold a key to locate Earth. Fate enables
an encounter with a woman on the planetary high council and our protagonist is
soon thrust into Soviet-style power politics.
There’re hints of unpleasantness in the form of Loamite organ harvesting
to extend the lifespans of Technos ruling elite, as well as “The Labyrinth,”
where unsuspecting victims must overcome mechnical and other fang and claw
nastiness. Most don’t last longer than
four minutes.

E. C. Tubb was one of those super-prolific Asimovian
writers of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. A
pioneer of British golden age science fiction, he died just a few years back at
the age of 90. The “Dumarest saga” was
written over a period of 18 years, from 1967 to 1985. If you come across any other of those 29
remaining books, send ’em my way, would ya?